Working with Private Hosted Zones

A private hosted zone is a container that holds information about how you want Amazon Route 53 to respond
to DNS queries
for a domain and its subdomains within one or more VPCs that you create with the
Amazon VPC service. Here's how private hosted zones work:

You create a private hosted zone, such as example.com, and specify the VPCs that you
want to associate with the hosted zone.

You create records in the hosted zone that determine how Route 53 responds to DNS
queries for your domain and subdomains
within and among your VPCs. For example, suppose you have a database server that
runs on an EC2 instance in one of the VPCs
that you associated with your private hosted zone. You create an A or AAAA record,
such as db.example.com, and you specify the
IP address of the database server.

When an application submits a DNS query for db.example.com, Route 53 returns the corresponding
IP address. The application
must also be running on an EC2 instance in one of the VPCs that you associated
with the example.com private hosted zone.

The application uses the IP address that it got from Route 53 to establish a connection
with the database server.

If you want to route traffic for your domain on the internet, you use a Route 53 public hosted zone.
For more information, see Working with Public Hosted Zones.